Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Magha Puja
     … When you’ve got everybody right here, that’s when you really can cleanse the mind. This leads to that other teaching about the mind: lifting the mind so that it’s heightened. This refers to getting the mind into concentration but also to lifting it above its ordinary concerns, seeing that a lot of the things that you’re concerned with out in … 
  3. Chewed Up by Your Food
     … We have to hold the perception of breath and body and mind, because otherwise the mind will wander off into other worlds. You need to use perceptions to be mindful, to stay with the breath, to keep remembering it, so that you don’t lose your frame of reference. There’s a very close connection between mindfulness and perception. You have to keep remembering … 
  4. Facing Your Responsibilities
     … But as you work with it, you begin to notice that you can observe things in the mind you wouldn’t be able to observe any other way: how it changes its mind, how one intention can sneak up on you to sabotage a previous intention. If you’re careful, you can see these things. If you’re alert and mindful, you begin to … 
  5. Identifying Weeds
    We have weeds in our mind. A lot of us spent the evening or the early part of the afternoon weeding. When you do something like that, it’s good to reflect on the lessons you learn outside and how they apply to the mind. In the orchard, we try to provide a place that provides shade, so we want the trees to grow … 
  6. A Willingness to Learn
    Each time you settle in to meditate, you’ve got to take stock of your mind: to see what shape it’s in, to see what it needs right now. Sometimes it’s really tired, it’s been thinking a lot and so it needs to rest. At other times, it’s sluggish and it needs to be activated. An important part of the … 
  7. The Luminous Mind
    There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha says that the mind is pabhassaram: luminous or radiant. He says that when people don’t realize this, they can’t develop their minds; they can’t train the mind. When you realize that the mind is luminous and that its defilements are visitors, then you can train the mind. In other words, if … 
  8. Factors for Awakening
     … Now, to do this, of course, you need to develop the other factors for awakening, starting with mindfulness. Mindfulness, in the Buddha’s sense of the term, means keeping something in mind. Right mindfulness means keeping in mind your resolve to stay with the body or with feelings or with mind states or with mental qualities, in and of themselves, as your primary frame … 
  9. Therapy for the Mind
    Therapy for the Mind September 13, 2020 The practice of the Dhamma is therapy for the mind, one that treats some diseases that are not mentioned in the psychologists’ handbooks. Greed, aversion, delusion: As far as psychologists are concerned, these things are normal. But the Buddha recognized that they’re diseases, illnesses of the mind. And he prescribed a course of treatment. Now, this … 
  10. Ignorance & Deception
     … And it’s when you’re able to deal with these sleights-of-hand in the mind that you actually begin to see things better in the mind. Once you see through this particular trick, you start seeing through a lot of the mind’s other tricks as well. You’re quicker to be up on things in the mind, and the insights you … 
  11. A Rare Gift
     … And the best use is training your own mind. Everything else you do comes out of the mind. Whether it’s things you do with the body, words you say with your speech, it all has to come from the mind. Your interactions with other people are going to be skillful or unskillful based on how well your mind is trained. So this should … 
  12. Deep Understanding
     … Which is why you need the third kind of understanding, the understanding that comes from developing the mind. In other words, instead of dealing with concepts, you’re dealing directly with qualities of the mind itself as they’re happening. On the level of listening and thinking, you can hear about mindfulness, you can hear about alertness, you can hear about concentration and discernment … 
  13. Doing, Maintaining, Using
     … The Buddha talks about three important skills in learning how to keep the mind centered. One is gladdening the mind, another is steadying the mind, and the third is liberating the mind. Whenever you find that a particular feeling has taken over, you learn how to pry the mind loose from that, from its grip, so that the mind is free even in the … 
  14. The Lightened Mind
     … This is how you ultimately lighten the mind. That’s when the mind is brought to its highest state. That’s when it’s totally free. So these are the stages in how you get from just learning to teach the mind how to be solid, to the goal which is totally unlimited. We heighten the mind by lightening it, and we lighten it … 
  15. Purity Comes Through Discernment
     … He says concentration requires two qualities of mind, tranquility and insight, just to get the mind to settle down. It’s not that you can simply force the mind or lullaby the mind into concentration. You need to understand it at least to some extent, so that it can stay focused on one topic without getting duped by its normal tendency to wander off … 
  16. In Restraint Is Strength
     … And it’s good to think of training the mind as a way of developing the mind. For one thing, thinking in this way reminds you that it’s not something that happens only when you sit here with your eyes closed or when you’re doing walking meditation. The mind can be developed at any time. And the exercises that develop the mind … 
  17. The Guarantee of Concentration
     … And the commentary that the mind runs all the time: You have to learn how to be a little bit leery of it. The mind is so quick to make comments on things. When you’re getting the mind into a state of concentration you’re stepping back a bit, you’re not singing along with the voices in the mind. You’re just … 
  18. The Thread of Mindfulness
    The Thread of Mindfulness April 13, 2015 The Buddha speaks of concentration as a perception-attainment through all the levels from the first jhana up through the dimension of nothingness. In each case, the perception you hold in mind keeps you in concentration, which means that as we’re concentrating, we’re fighting against the passage we chanted just now about perceptions being inconstant … 
  19. Monastery Standard Time
     … Sometimes it takes months to observe a pattern in the mind. But once you’ve understood it, it’s worth all the time that it takes. So try to keep your mind on monastic standard time—or at least part of the mind on monastic standard time. The rest of the mind can go live by lay time. But let part of the mind … 
  20. Reflect on Your Actions
    One of the main purposes of meditation is to get you more sensitive to what your mind is doing while you’re doing it, and also to see the results of what you’ve done so that you can gauge what needs to be changed. This ability to reflect on your actions is really central to the practice. This is how the Buddha himself … 
  21. Skills for Living & Dying
     … That’s an important insight, and it’s why the first verse in the Dhammapada is, “The mind is the forerunner of all things.” In other words, the mind, your awareness, is not just the side effect of physical events in the body. The mind is what’s actually driving things. Which means, of course, that when the body dies, the mind doesn’t … 
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